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Dell Inspiron 5748 Sound Card Upgrade Suggestions


Neil Cummins

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How many channels (and what type) of I/O do you need?

Do you need mic preamp/s?

What is "reasonably priced"?   Meaning, what's your budget?

 

Frankly,  any dedicated audio interface with a proper ASIO driver is going to be an improvement.

There's a lot of variation on cost, quality, and round-trip latency.

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Be careful of getting GAS   (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) while undertaking this recording venture, It can become a real stinker!!  ?

You forum guys have got me stuck on this one...?

 

Edited by jesse g
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14 hours ago, jesse g said:

Be careful of getting GAS   (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) while undertaking this recording venture, It can become a real stinker!!  ?

You forum guys have got me stuck on this one...?

 

It is like Heroin addiction, you need a daily fix if your not carefool. And you do not write better song with better gear, the reason a mix is bad, is not because of bad gear ether. Because the best songs were not made with computer at all, and the best recording engeneers can make it sound good on any equipment.

But latency is the issue to consider. And ASIO and USB soundcard  is the only way to fix that on a laptop! So much easier to sing on while recording with just a little reverb on the vocals monitors and so on.

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Depends on what you mean by "improved results". If you mean better-sounding audio, then prepare for a big letdown after spending big bucks on an outboard interface. It's going to be only marginally better, if you can hear a difference at all.

But if you mean more inputs and outputs, more and quieter amplification, real knobs, convenient jacks, better driver support, an effects loop, then an outboard interface is the way to go. Being in the UK, I'd suggest starting your search with Focusrite. Their stuff is relatively inexpensive, well-supported and reliable.

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3 hours ago, bitflipper said:

In the old forum, somebody would have created a similarly-titled thread full of off-topic nonsense observations.

Good thing those people didn't come over to the new forum, eh?

In the old forum there was a sub-forum for actual technique and hardware questions. icon_whimsical.gif

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I agree the current variety of sound chips such as Realtek are very good and mostly have negated the use of an add on sound card such as SoundBlaster.  In this particular case, as its a laptop and no provisions for add on cards, any "upgrade" would have to be a USB connected device.  

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Noise-floor on a dedicated audio interface with external A/D D/A can be very significantly lower than onboard audio.

ie: Realtek isn't going to get anywhere close to average noise-floor of -118dB.

You may not notice a 12dB difference on a single track... but multiply that across 24 tracks of audio... and it's an appreciable difference.

Like pulling a veil of noise off the project...

 

Even dedicated audio interfaces that have A/D D/A inside the PC rarely achieve noise-floor better than ~104dB (usually closer to -100dB).

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